The Political Passage from Personal Grief to Collective Agency: Government-Sponsored Projects to Unearth Hidden Histories

Ana María Venegas’ testimony effectively illuminates one of the central tenets of my argument about the interrelated nature of mourning, intergenerational transmission, and political activism. The road to reclaim truth, justice, and reparation for the victims of right-wing violence in civil war and postwar Spain originates in the space of private grief, continues through the channels of storytelling practices, and eventually culminates in a place of collective activism. Nowhere is this trajectory more compellingly illustrated than in Venegas’ 2010 memoir, Los nuestros. Following my detailed reading of this account of the pioneering twenty-first-century exhumation in Andalucía, I propose a two-pronged approach to the study of two video documentaries that incorporate interviews with relatives of shooting victims. In addition to examining the text of select documentaries, I also offer analysis of oral testimonies that I recorded with some of the same family members originally featured in the videos. Like Ana María Venegas’ book, published with government monies earmarked in 2005 for the retrieval and dissemination of the untold stories of civil war and repression, the videotaped voices that tell once-private stories are now broadcast thanks to institutional support in the province of Cádiz.